To many contemporary literary critics, the modernist tradition, with
its emphasis on subjectivity and the internalization of images and
events, is not only elitist and reactionary but dead, replaced by the
more open, accessible, and democratic playfulness of postmodernism.
Donoghue, who teaches English and American literature at New York
University, begs to differ. The "interiority" of modernist
writers, he argues, is an authentic and enduring realm of imaginative
freedom: "Thinking, feeling, reverie: the pleasures of these are
self-evident, they don't have to be judged upon their results or
upon their consequence as action in the world."

In The Old Moderns, which contains 17 elegant essays, some previously
published, Donoghue defends literary subjectivity on another front as
well. Today's critics impose upon literature their own political or
philosophical beliefs, often purposefully stifling the voice of the
author. In fact, literary theory has hardened into such dogma that
there's not much one can do with it except force "it upon your
poems as if they could have no other desire than to receive such
overbearing attention." Donoghue argues that literature should be
read as literature--that is, with disinterested aesthetic appreciation,
"as practices of experience to be imagined." These practices
are related to such areas as religion, politics, and economics, but they
should not be confused with them.

Donoghue's own critical restraint begins with his definition of
modernism. For the sake of argument he settles upon one particular
meaning, but acknowledges that "a different account of it would be
just as feasible." Donoghue links the rise of literary modernism to
the growth of cities in the 19th century, specifically to the situation
of individuals who found their individuality threatened by mass society
and the crowd. In response, the modernist mind turned inward, to ponder
the validity of its feelings. Modernism was thus the result of writers
perceiving "their development as an inner drama, rather than as a
willing engagement with the contents of the objective culture."

Donoghue continues to demonstrate his notion of restraint in his dose
but never overbearing reading of works by such modernist heroes as Henry
James, Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot. In
essays refreshingly free of literary jargon, Donoghue succeeds at making
the literature more important than the criticism.

Ironically, Donoghue notes, theorists who judge literature by its
political relevance undermine the power of art to affect the world:
"The supreme merit of art is that it contradicts the version of
reality that obtains in social and economic life." Moreover,
"introspection is not the puny, self-regarding act it is commonly
said to be but an act of ethical and moral bearing by which the mind, in
privacy, imagines lives other than its own. The chief justification for
reading literature is that it trains the reader in the exercise of that
imagination."

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